Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyattpeak | Hacker News Reader

> Main drawback has really been that few people I know use it and I've had to cajole people into doing so a little bit, which stinks.

I find it fascinating how committed everyone now is to Zoom when, at least in my circle, almost nobody had used it before two weeks ago. At that point, everyone installed it as soon as the first meeting came up, and besides the ten minutes of everyone figuring it out it was plain sailing.

It's incredible to me that something everyone did without a thought two weeks ago (installing a new chat application) is now enough of a burden to not bother with. Highlights strikingly the value of being the first mover (or first adopted, as the case may be).

View on HN

> I find it fascinating how committed everyone now is to Zoom when, at least in my circle, almost nobody had used it before two weeks ago.

Anecdotally, almost every startup/VC/etc. in my circle has been using Zoom for the past 2+ years (Paris and London). So there was probably a seed ready to take root not far from you. I've had the occasional Hangouts, and the rare WebEx or Teams meeting with some larger orgs, but that's it. I haven't even logged in to Skype in that time period.

Even my parents have been able to use zoom seamlessly from their phones. I think it helps that you don't even have to login or have an account if it's always someone else creating the meetings.

Zoom was not the first mover in chat/video apps, far from it. But over the past few years, it has overtaken all the other, older ones for the early adopters in the technology adoption cycle, at least in my anecdotal experience. The last few weeks have accelerated the mass adoption that could have taken much longer or never happened to an instant.

I'm sure, I gathered from the uptake that it wasn't new. My point wasn't about being a first mover (although I compared to the that), but about being the first to be taken up. How people's attitudes towards that initial hurdle of getting a system set up change extremely quickly.

It was easy to convince everyone to install Zoom two weeks ago, now I don't believe I could convince them to install anything else to replace it.

While Zoom may have overtaken others over a couple of years due to being a better system or what have you, that had no impact on my friends and colleagues who hadn't used it or others to come to an informed opinion on the matter.

At my company we've used for a few years each: Hangout, Bluejeans, and Zoom. We got acquired so now we're also using Skype and Teams alongside Zoom. Zoom didn't really invent anything groundbreaking, they did the same thing but with a better execution, it's more pleasant to use.

Similarly, we used Hipchat before Slack, and now we have Teams and Slack. Slack serves the same purpose, but it's more pleasant to use than the other two.

Neither Slack nor Zoom were groundbreaking products, and they had significant competition. They both do the same thing as their competitors, and you could argue the difference isn't crazy, but the user experience improvements are enough to justify switching products.

I guess I'm just confirming that I had a similar experience to yours.

You can use Zoom with a browser though, which means you might not have to install anything.

In practice it has never worked for me in the browser (on Debian), but I guess it does for most people.

Anectdotal. But I've only ever heard from people that zoom web did not work. Everyone I've asked told me the same: 'no it did not work, but then I installed it, and it did work'.

Apparently their network effect is so big now, that people use it, despite it not working on first encounter.

I use Zoom on Kubuntu when needed for work, and I always use the web version as I refuse to install the app. It has worked well with Chromium and Brave. Firefox doesn't work well if at all for video chat.

Funny, had to use Zoom recently because of some clients who insisted on using it, and I had to install software (OS X), it didn't work in the browser or I didn't find the switch.

https://github.com/arkadiyt/zoom-redirector Zoom Redirector is a browser extension that transparently redirects any meeting links to use Zoom's browser based web client.

As seen in [0], it just changes the URL. This can be done with the Redirector [1] addon, which is generic and can help with similar problems for other webpages (Twitter -> Nitter; Youtube -> Invidious; www.reddit.com -> old.reddit.com). I wish there was a way to make and see user-made rules.

[0] https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/thumbs/23...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/redirector/

On a sidenote, debians chromium is modified to be libre (or closee to that) and firefox is in the esr version.

MS Teams did also not work for me on debian, up until I bit the bullet and grabbed the Chrome .deb.

I hate it but it works flawlessly

I've used a few video conferencing packages and Zoom just works, and works well. No quality issues or dropouts, Linux isn't treated as a second-class citizen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com